When Brits Peter Friend and Mark Barber opened a boutique B&B in the south of France, little did they know just how successful it would become.
Article written by The Overseas Guides Company
Listed in high profile travel guides and with three Trip Advisor Travellers Choice Awards to their name, who better to ask for advice on running a French guesthouse…
So Peter, how did you come to open your B&B in France?
Back in 2005, Mark and I set ourselves the goal of moving and opening our own business by 2009, the year we turned 40. At the time, I was a business development manager working in Surrey and Mark a hotel manager in Windsor. France seemed to offer the right combination of a good lifestyle and great opportunities for a tourism business. We found and bought our B&B, which is in the Tarn and 45 minutes from Carcassonne, in the second half of 2005, paying just under €390,000 for it. Over the following three years we spent around €200,000 renovating the property, before opening Villa Mazamet in 2009.
Could you list your five top tips for anyone thinking of opening a B&B?
- Firstly, be very clear as to what you want from your business – will it be a room or two to to help you cover your winter bills or will it be, as with us, your sole income, which means you’ll require many more rooms. This will also dictate how much you will charge for a night room, for meals and so on. Research the local market, but don’t just assume that because other places are charging €50 a night you can’t charge €75-plus if you have the right offering.
- Choose the area of France you want to be in very carefully and do a lot of research into accessibility, what guests can see and do there, the length of the potential season, the climate and even any future developments planned by the local municipality.
- You MUST have a genuine interest in meeting and engaging with people from a diverse background and have the patience and demeanours to always be cheerful. Also, you must have a diverse skill-set, from marketing to cleaning, and maintenance to gardening!
- Don’t be under the illusion that running a B&B is easy. It takes a massive amount of energy and graft, for example Mark and I both work 16-18 hours a day through the busy May-October period. To help re-charge your batteries, it is so important to ensure that you create private space within your property that is solely for you and not guests.
- Ensure that you set up your business within the correct bureaucratic framework – this can be complex but getting it right from the outset is essential. We took – and continue to take – invaluable advice from a specialist accountant that looks after expats in France. In the same vein, ensure you have all of the correct paperwork for things like insurance, business registration and an alcohol licence.
Have you any general money-saving tips?
We used a currency exchange specialist called Smart Currency Exchange instead of our UK bank to send money to France when buying and restoring our property. At the time we were banking with Lloyds TSB and they could not touch the exchange rate we got from Smart. Smart helped us pay our initial deposit for the Villa Mazamet and then secured us a rate for six months to help us budget for paying our mortgage. On occasions, for example when we had large builder’s bills to pay, we used Smart for one-off payments, what they call ‘spot’ contracts. It all worked really well for us.
For details of property for sale in France, visit the French listings on Rightmove Overseas. One way to save money when buying in France, or moving there, is to use a currency exchange specialist when transferring your pounds into euros. For more information on this, visit the Currency Zone or contact Smart Currency Exchange.
To understand the full step-by-step process to buying a property in France, collect The Overseas Guides Company’s ‘France Property Buying Guide’
The views and comments herein are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of Rightmove Overseas, Rightmove Group Ltd or Rightmove Plc